Here are the features being considered for removal. Reasons are varied: not widespread use, have been replace with a general purpose one, are blocking important updates.
It is very likely these features will be removed but what we are looking for is feedback on the transition to their replacement, if any, and the timeline that will cause less disruption.
Our approach is to push these breaking changes on major versions but we hope to be able to push them in minor versions to make them available sooner.
Sources
Settings metadata from the sender, subject, recipient properties of the email.
This code is single purpose for the sources and requires a specific implementation that blocks a series of patches that convert the sources into background tasks for increased performance and ability to handle even larger files.
This code also blocks the addition of new source types in development.
The feature will be replaced with a general purpose storage of source attributes during the document creation. Adding metadata to documents based on their source will be done via workflows using the stored source information.
The stored source information storage will retain things like the ID of the source used to create the document, the original date of submission, message ID in case of email sources, an any other property related to the creation of the document.
This change is backward incompatible but the alternative will provide the same (and more information). Users will need to adjust their templates to examine the document source properties instead of the document metadata.
Retrieving metadata values from the special metadata.yaml attachment.
Like the previous features this one requires a special coding and is not reusable. It also introduces knowledge of the metadata system into the sources app which breaks separation of concerns.
There is no current replacement for this features. A general purpose replacement has been suggested and designed but there is no running implementation yet.
Removal of these two source features will allow adding more source type like the staging storage and watch storage which work like the staging folder and watch folder but for loading documents from plugable storages like object storage an SFTP.
These change is being considered for version 4.6 (maybe even 4.5 if time allows). If there is no consensus the changes will happen in version 5.0 as majors versions is where breaking changes are pushed.
Your feedback is important to help us decide if we should wait for version 5.0 (not scheduled yet) or push these breaking changes in a minor version (4.6 or even 4.5 which is approaching alpha).
Thank you.